


Reiteration

by misslonelyhearts



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Chasind, F/M, Korcari Wilds, Rodarte, fashion - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-11
Updated: 2012-04-11
Packaged: 2017-11-03 11:43:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/381009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misslonelyhearts/pseuds/misslonelyhearts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>inspired by iheartapostates. . .and her drawing of Anders in Rodarte fashion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reiteration

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.

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In what is becoming their usual fashion, Anders ignores the witch and the witch allows the Chasind a few moments to scurry nervously away. They abandon the fire, leaving their comfortable spots around him, and move to the opposite side of camp.

He should rise.  Offer some greeting or playful leering (his particular variety is so useful, even out here).  But when inspiration strikes a mage like Anders –indeed, a _man_ like Anders -- very little can stop his fingers in their work.  Sometimes that work is shaping a crack of lighting, and sometimes it’s pressing into the shape of another’s body.  At the moment, his admittedly malleable sense of purpose is focused on ripping his former Circle robes to shreds.  The sound of rending cloth isn’t as sharp and precious as he’d hoped, though.  Mostly, his fingers ache.

“Tis a practice they admire, you know.” Morrigan steps out of the shadowy treeline.  The Chasind don’t gasp, but they do keep to their side of the fire.  Anders doesn’t look up.

“What is?”

“This ritual of refashioning your former life.”  Her voice is deepest, he’s discovered, when she’s _educating_ him.  “Is it only a more elegant form of cannibalism.”

“Well, I’ll endeavor to clean my plate.  As it were.”  He looks up to find her leaning on her staff.  The apostates regard each other in the uneven light.  Anders wants so many things.  They roil in him sometimes, competing for his breath.  They scrabble across stone and lake water, ceaselessly moving limbs that should be frozen with exhaustion.  Freedom.  Comfort.  Home.  With a grunt, he goes back to shredding the robes.

While he works, Morrigan settles herself beside him on the ground.  Anders slows his fingers, at turns tsking at his blisters and complaining about the irregular strips of red and black and gold.  Before long, his ploy works.  She is incapable of suffering ineptitude.  In Anders, she has found the perfect oddity.  A pale and sinewy project.  A standout among the echoing remainders of people she has known here.  And so, she helps.  Though she would never call it that.

“Rise.” Commands the witch.  And the Chasind gather themselves further apart when the mages stand together with their limp pelts of cloth.  Morrigan rolls her eyes at them, and then gestures at Anders’s borrowed tunic and trousers.  “Remove those.”

“Buy me a pint first?” His eyes go a little heavy, overly self-conscious about his wit, and not nearly enough so about his gradual nudity.

They spend an hour covering his body with their hands, and occasionally with scant cloth.  Tying, twisting, and knotting.  Where their fingers meet, neither flinches.  Indeed, they share a common desire in the tactile and the natural.  Fabric and leather.  The arch of an eyebrow, and the warmth of fingers.  Together, they make him into an idol of rags and wicked intention. Anders looks down at himself and sighs.  Had he thought her incapable of being playful?  Truly?  Morrigan twirls her fingers, and Anders mimics with his body.

If the Templars could see him now!  Jutting hips and long legs newly exposed.  She’s made him into an echo of herself as much as a re-imagined Chasind.  Happily, he finds it not at all distasteful.  To spend whatever days he can here as some copy of this woman, the fancy toy of a power he craves, is as close to home as his imagination has thusfar allowed.

“It lacks. . .something.”  She murmurs, a single finger laid aside her cheek.  Gold eyes assess and realign him.  Again, Anders finds it without discomfort.  And the swinging ribbons that hang from his waist make him feel like a rebel.  It is the most sacred thing he knows.

“Smalls, for one thing.” He replies, thighs flexing in firelight.

“Do you require such?”

“Never.” He winks at her.  To his glory, she smiles back.

“I have just the thing.”  She offers, almost excited.

From her shoulder, she plucks an iridescent, black feather.  In any light, Anders thinks, it could be green or blue or gold.  For him it is black.  Morrigan steps close, lifting a rag from the streamers at his hip, and teases out a single thread.  This she wraps and ties around the feather.

The witch smiles again, eyes narrowing, and she reaches up to thread the feather through the gold hoop in his earlobe.  Anders sighs.  What comes is never a choice, only what he needs to do.  Without realizing it, he leans into her, seeking, body bending around like a stream divided by a moss-covered stone.  A soft clucking issues from her throat, and her fingers pause. “Be very still.”

She moves against him, breasts and the clink of her heavy necklace filling in the shape of his arm, his chest.  The fingers at his ear brush his neck, his jaw.  They are only working, but they can always be more than that if Anders closes his eyes.  Which he does. 

And then the world is all the shadows of possibility behind his eyelids.  The smell of fire soot and elfroot on her hands.  The slither of her skin on his arm, and a dark hollow in his throat to catch the sound he makes when her lips drift so close to his ear . . .and do not kiss him.  They do not press against his stubble or linger on his neck.  There’s no fairness in the world, even the one he imagines. Only the soft clack of her teeth as she bites the thread, shortening it, and steps back.

When he opens his eyes, Anders finds Morrigan giving him the oddest look.  But, at least he can breathe again.  Which he does only because he has to.

"You are. . .still unfinished.”  She says, and walks off into the startled mess of Chasind who have been watching.  They don’t flee, but they seem to want to.  Morrigan gestures at their arms, and then crosses hers before glancing over her feathered shoulder at him.  Anders can’t hear what she says, and doesn’t especially care.   What he’d like is to go back to the moment before, and decides to do so in private later on.  Unless he might convince her to relive it with him. Though he doubts it very much.




When she returns to his side, there’s a young Chasind girl with her.  In her exceptionally dirty hands lays a corked pot, and the oldest paintbrush Anders has ever seen.  But the bristles are silky, long, and intensely black.  The girl blinks up at him, mouth small and slack.

“Sit.”  Morrigan commands.  Anders doesn’t move, transfixed by the round eyes and rounder mouth.  The witch arches an eyebrow, sighing. “Please.”

The mage seats himself in the leaves and dirt, followed down by the girl and her pot.  The cork comes off, the brush goes in.  The paint goes on, thick and cool.  Instantly, the flesh of his arm prickles deliciously, warring with itself over the chilled sting of the ink and the fire’s heat.  He can’t help it.  Anders makes a half moan in his throat.  But, the girl doesn’t stop.  Her little mouth purses, divine in its simple love of this art.  She strokes the patterns he’ll never understand onto his arm. 

Above him, Morrigan shifts her weight against her staff.  “T’will not last.”

“It’s only ink.” Says Anders, watching the whorls appear with perfect contrast over his skin.  He wonders if the girl has a name.  If she’s made one up, as he has, to speak something of herself that her rags do not.  “It isn’t meant to.”

“I did not mean-“ Her voice sharpens, gains an edge of silver. As it always does when she _corrects_ him.

“I know.”  He murmurs down at the curve of his arm, where the small, dirty hand casts its fluid grace over him.  Admiring not only the angles of the ink, but also the free splay of ribboned cloth around his thighs.


End file.
